Plant responses to heterogeneous salinity: agronomic relevance and research priorities.

Background: Soil salinity, in both natural and managed environments, is highly heterogeneous, and understanding how plants respond to this spatiotemporal heterogeneity is increasingly important for sustainable agriculture in the era of global climate change. While the vast majority of research on crop response to salinity utilizes homogeneous saline conditions, a much smaller, but important, effort has been made in the past decade to understand plant molecular and physiological responses to heterogeneous salinity mainly by using split-root studies. These studies have begun to unravel how plants compensate for water/nutrient deprivation and limit salt stress by optimizing root-foraging in the most favourable parts of the soil.

Mitigating Heat Wave and Exposure Damage to "Cabernet Sauvignon" Wine Grape With Partial Shading Under Two Irrigation Amounts.

Rising temperatures in most agricultural regions of the world are associated with a higher incidence of extreme weather events such as heat waves. We performed an experiment to mitigate the impact of heat waves and exposure of berries in grapevine ( cv. "Cabernet Sauvignon") with untreated vines (Exposed) or with fruit-zone partial shading (Shaded) under 40 and 80% replacement of crop evapotranspiration (ET ) with sustained deficit irrigation in a factorially arranged experiment.

Partial Solar Radiation Exclusion with Color Shade Nets Reduces the Degradation of Organic Acids and Flavonoids of Grape Berry (Vitis vinifera L.).

The incidence of solar radiation on red-skinned grapes can promote the synthesis of flavonoids desirable for wine production, but elevated temperature may impair their accumulation. We performed a shade cloth trial covering the fruit zone (from pepper-corn size to maturity) with four polyethylene 1 m curtains with different optical properties (20% shading factor Pearl colored and 40% shading factor Aluminet, Blue, and Black colored) and a Control with no cover. Cluster temperature was 3.